Wow. There’s a lot of potentially useful info here. I’ll try to respond to as much as I can.
@drogon Write once run anywhere is kind of what I’m aiming for, as long as “anywhere” only includes platforms with a keyboard.
Adding more platforms to FreePascal would be one way of achieving that. Another would be to add more interpreters or virtual machines to an existing text adventure system.
Yet another would be to create the 8-bit virtual machine I originally mentioned.
PLASMA does look interesting. I’ve added to my (many) bookmarks.
BCPL is helpful as an example of what can be done. The language itself would be less useful to retro enthusiasts than BASIC though.
I know about most of the more popular existing text adventure (aka interactive fiction these days) systems, but most require a disk drive.
@NoLand I would likely start off by testing a small subset of BASIC, but I would be aiming for Minimal BASIC. I believe that Vintage BASIC follows that standard reasonably closely.
Of course, before that I am hoping to set my sights a little lower and attempt a simpler system.
@davidb I have that repository bookmarked. One of the possibilities I have been considering is attempting to reverse engineer Level 9’s A-code system, as it was designed for 8-bit tape-based systems (unlike Infocom’s Z-machine).
Others are actively exploring the old games and one of the Austin brothers is trying to get all the original code together and update the tools for modern machines. Nobody seems to know how long that might take though.
The main problem is that only the opcodes they used are (mostly) known. The coding language is a mystery and the only virtual machine is for modern computers.
To complicate matters, there were 4 different versions of the virtual machine created over the years.
@mainframetom If you mean an existing virtual machine, then there aren’t any publicly available for the machines I wish to support. There are emulators of the physical machines though.
I’m only interested in creating text-based programs, so that should reduce the number of differences between machines. I might add graphics capabilities to a couple of them, but I wouldn’t attempt it for every platform.
Others with greater knowledge of such systems could potentially expand the code, if they wanted graphics badly enough.
Whatever I come up with should be able to produce code for physical machines, preferably by loading from physical tape or a digital recorder. There are existing utilities to convert program files to an audio format.
Yes, I’m still looking for a similar system to the one I mentioned in my previous thread.
@EnthusiastGuy I hadn’t considered supporting fantasy computers. It’s an interesting idea.
If I manage to get something up and running for real retro machines, I will explore doing the same for fantasy emulators, depending on what programming tools are available for them.
